For most of my life, festive gatherings seemed to happen automatically. What happens when those quietly maintaining family traditions stop?

Originally published by South China Morning Post on 26th August 2026

Last Chinese New Year, the reunion dinner unfolded the way it always has: with an almost rehearsed ease that disguises how much work it takes to look effortless.

The dishes arrived in their expected order. Conversations circled familiar ground – work, health, travel plans. There was a comfort in that predictability, as if the evening was held together by habit more than intention.

At some point, plans for the next day, the first day of Lunar New Year, were mentioned. There was a short discussion about visits, timings, who might or might not be able to make it. Within two minutes, we resumed eating.

But I remember thinking, if my parents stopped organising all of this, would I know how to do it?

Not in the obvious sense of cooking or booking a restaurant, but in the deeper sense of holding the thing together. I wouldn’t know who needs to be invited first, or how invitations move through a family that no longer shares a single neighbourhood. I wouldn’t know the unspoken rules: who should never be seated together, who needs to be checked with early, who will never explicitly ask to be visited but will notice if they are not.

Nor would I know which traditions are fixed only because someone has always taken responsibility for them. For most of my life, Chinese New Year seemed to run itself. As a child, I only saw the finished product. You were moved from one house to another, one meal to the next.

Many younger family members only ever encounter Chinese New Year when it is up and running. They arrive after the bookings have been made, after the schedule has been stabilised, after the invisible negotiations have already resolved the hardest parts.

Yet nothing about it is automatic; the coordination required is mostly invisible. Someone tracks multiple households’ calendars and resolves conflicts that never formally surface. Someone maintains an informal map of relationships that exists nowhere in writing but governs decisions. Someone remembers sensitivities that are rarely spoken aloud, but which quietly determine when people arrive and where they sit.

Even the simplest parts of the system require constant maintenance. Restaurants are booked weeks in advance. Messages are sent, followed up, nudged again. Dietary restrictions are remembered without being written down. Transport is arranged for relatives who would otherwise stay home. Each adjustment allows a large group of people to temporarily function as a coherent unit.

Because the work is distributed across dozens of small decisions, it doesn’t appear as a single role. It sits somewhere between administration and care, and most families have people who do this work. They are rarely described as organisers. They are mothers, aunts and grandmothers.

The invisibility of the system only breaks when something goes wrong: a missed invitation, an awkward pairing at the table, a gathering that feels slightly misaligned.

Tradition endures not only because it is meaningful, but because someone is willing to carry the friction required to keep it going. But this is becoming harder to sustain. Across East Asia, family structures have been changing for decades: fewer children, later marriages, longer life expectancies, more people living away from where they grew up. In Singapore, household sizes have steadily declined alongside fertility rates. The result is fewer people available to share the invisible work.

As it is now common for relatives to be spread across multiple countries, what used to be a neighbourhood-scale coordination process has become something closer to a multi-time-zone negotiation.

Technology has made contact easier, without lightening the load of coordination. If anything though, group chats on WhatsApp or WeChat have made the labour more visible. The messages multiply but someone still has to decide and remember what everyone else assumes will be handled. The system has not disappeared, but it has become more explicit.

Many younger family members only ever encounter Chinese New Year when it is up and running. They arrive after the bookings have been made, after the schedule has been stabilised, after the invisible negotiations have already resolved the hardest parts. What they see is the outcome: a seamless sequence of gatherings. They seldom see the process that made it possible.

And so the knowledge does not fully transfer. For it is learned only by doing, by being the person who notices what needs to happen next before anyone says it out loud.

At the same time, expectations are shifting. Younger generations are less willing to absorb large amounts of unpaid coordination and emotional labour as a default condition of belonging. That is often framed as cultural erosion. But it is also a redefinition of what fairness within a family looks like: who is expected to carry the friction and why.

Families still want the same outcomes – meals that happen, gatherings that feel intact, continuity across years, connection that survives distance. But those outcomes do not emerge on their own. They have been produced, repeatedly, by someone taking responsibility for the uncertainty that everyone else prefers not to see.

So I keep returning to that moment at the reunion dinner, when a few of us casually discussed plans for the next day, but no one took responsibility for them. The older relatives who usually hold everyone accountable weren’t at the table, revealing how easily the system could lapse without someone actively holding it together.

For all the attention given to preserving traditions, far less attention is paid to the systems for maintaining them. And even less to what happens when those systems are no longer naturally inherited.

One day, someone will have to take over that work. I’m not sure anyone is being prepared for it yet.